Dana Levy

Israel

Dana Levy was born in Tel Aviv, and lives and works in New York. She works with video, print and installation. Recurring themes are archives of different kind and the notion of home as a fragile, non-static place. This has appeared in her work through looking at the power of nature over the man-made world, despite man’s attempts to subdue nature. Levy completed her MA in Electronic Imaging at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Scotland, and her BA from Camberwell Art College in London.

This Was Home

This Was Home is comprised of three screens presenting three generations of the artist’s family. On one screen her maternal grandfather Karl Ribstein, another shows her father Yossi Levy, and the third presents the artist herself. Levy documented each of these protagonists on a journey back to their childhood city and to the home where they grew up, which they had not revisited since having to leave it in their childhood. Levy’s grandfather returns to Sosnowiec, Poland, from where he was sent in the 1940s to Auschwitz concentration camp; her father returns to his hometown Cairo, Egypt, from where he was uprooted in the 1950s when his family immigrated to Israel, where they lived in a ma’abara (immigrant camp) in Haifa; and Levy herself returns to her childhood home in Atlanta, Georgia, which she had to leave upon her family’s return from the United States to Tel Aviv, her birthplace. The depiction of three generations emphasizes the differences between their personal stories as related to different times and places. At the same time, however, and presented side by side, they turn into a multi-generational journey of identity, each becoming a chapter in the age-old history of Jewish wanderings.